“No right or wrong”: Vice’s chilling, hypocritical ode to abortion

I hope you’re not reading this soon before or after a mealtime, because today we’re going to talk about another case of abortion advocates “honoring” evil as something heroic.

One of several Vice Broadly articles in “honor of Planned Parenthood’s 100-year anniversary” is a profile on Michelle Kinsey Bruns, a “clinic escort” who “helps women get past belligerent anti-abortion protesters trying to shame or scare them out of accessing reproductive care.”

It opens with an anecdote about Bruns encountering several dozen pro-life teens at the Washington DC metro for the annual March for Life, and telling them an abortion when she was eighteen “saved my life” from thoughts of suicide. It was important for Bruns that a bunch of Catholic kids she assumed to be ignorant and brainwashed could “hear, for perhaps the first time in their lives, a positive, no regrets, post-abortion narrative.”

You may recall that I wrote about this very incident for Live Action in 2013. There, you’ll learn one critical detail Vice leaves out: While Bruns condescendingly assumed the pro-life kids were “puffed up on privilege” and not “well-informed,” she left before they had a chance to respond at all, so in reality she has no idea how deeply they understood the issue or how familiar they were with contrary perspectives. Heaven forbid facts and scrutiny get in the way of a good emotional appeal!

“The abortion I had at 18 happened at a time when I was recovering from the violence of my childhood, and trying to find a way out of the poverty of my childhood,” Bruns tells Broadly. She’s been adamantly pro-choice since she was in middle school, and she’s certain that she wouldn’t have survived and thrived in the way she has had it not been for her choice to get an abortion.

The childhood abuse Bruns describes certainly warrants understanding and compassion. It does not, however, entitle her to overlook the fact that “her choice” cost a real, live, human child the opportunity to survive and thrive. Conversations about how to humanely assist situations like hers are important, but nobody’s suffering is ever a license to pay that suffering forward to someone else.

But it wasn’t until the 2009 murder of George Tiller, a doctor who performed abortions in Kansas, that Bruns became seriously involved with reproductive rights activism.

“I realized the fear this would cause, for clinic patients and clinic staff, and that was just intolerable to me,” Bruns tells Broadly.

One murder in over a decade highlights the importance of helping to facilitate other murders? Oh, and Tiller didn’t “just” perform abortions; he killed third-trimester babies, and treated his “patients” like dirt. Most of those babies he aborted, he admitted, were completely healthy.

She says she’s heard protesters shout outlandish claims, such as “Don’t go in there, that doctor rapes women on the table!”

What abortionist she’s referring to (or if she even heard it at all) is of course impossible to verify unless Bruns gives more details, but for the record, Arizona abortionist Brian Finkel was convicted of sexually abusing patients in 2004, three patients have accused Oklahoma abortionist Naresh Patel of rape and sexual assault, and Bahamas abortionist Gerald Mark Forbes was charged with rape in July. So maybe it’s not so outlandish after all…

Statistically, one in three women will have an abortion in their lifetime, and Bruns emphasizes that there are no right or wrong reasons for choosing to terminate a pregnancy—simply put, women don’t need a justification for maintaining their own bodily autonomy.

Sigh. The 1-in-3 stat wasn’t true when Bruns peddled it three years ago, and it still isn’t true—the original study this claim came from, which actually said it was 30%, warned that number wasn’t intended to be taken as a “precise measure.” I do have to concede, however, that “there is no right or wrong” is about the most succinct summary of the pro-abortion mindset one could ask for.

The article next regurgitates fear mongering about Donald Trump supposedly wanting to punish women for abortions, Mike Pence being a scary anti-abortion extremist, and Indiana punishing Purvi Patel for “having a miscarriage.” Inasmuch as it gets tiring having to re-correct the same lies over and over again, I’ll simply refer readers here, here, and here for the facts behind each claim.

“No one should be compelled to sacrifice her own life or livelihood or health or safety or future for the sake of a pregnancy, under any circumstances,” she says. “Not by force of law, not out of economic desperation, not out of social stigma. Not for any reason at all, other than her own consent.”

Right there, we see the ultimate reason why Vice, Michelle Kinsey Bruns, and their fellow travelers will never get the submission they crave: their hypocrisy. Appeals about “sacrifice” will always ring hollow when they’re used as a justification to compel children to sacrifice their own lives—literally, in their case—and especially when abortion advocates can’t even be honest about it.

Pro-lifers can and do work toward compassion for both mother and child, whereas the abortion industry sees compassion for one as nothing more than a weapon with which to destroy the other.